IP/optical integration typically results in cost savings, but maintaining service availability is also essential when measuring total return on investment (ROI). An analysis of 3 modes of operation found multi-layer protection and restoration to be the most cost efficient while meeting availability requirements.

Public safety professionals require the highest level of reliable, multimedia mobile communications to enhance their operational effectiveness. And while standard based long term evolution (LTE) provides the most cost-effective and secure way to support these broadband communications, transitioning to this new technology will demand a complex technical, operational, and business evolution for the public safety community.

Why LTE – and why now?

Public safety communications are at a turning point. The most urgent events – planned and unplanned – require more than mission-critical voice to improve first responders’ efficiency. Real-time imagery, video, geo-localization, and high-speed access to private cloud-based information and applications are becoming essential to fulfill first responders’ missions.

Existing private mobile radio (PMR) systems have limited capabilities to deliver this, because they were designed to primarily support narrowband mission-critical voice.

For LTE, it’s a different story. LTE can complement existing PMR networks to dramatically enhance operational effectiveness and coordination within a secure infrastructure shared by cooperating agencies.

OpenStack isn’t an as-is solution for telco network functions virtualization (NFV) infrastructures. OpenStack is an open-source cloud management technology that provides many of the capabilities needed in any NFV environment. And this has prompted interest among many telco service providers.

But to realize the full benefits of NFV, service providers need NFV platforms that provide additional capabilities to support distributed clouds, enhanced network control, lifecycle management, and high performance data planes.

In October 2010, the FBI determined malware, most likely from an intelligence agency of another country had snuck into the Nasdaq’s central servers.

The following facts are the most shocking:

Several different groups were operating freely on Nasdaq computers, some of which may have been in the exchange’s networks for years, including criminal hackers and Chinese cyberspies.

Basic records of the daily activity occurring on the company’s servers, which would have helped investigators trace the hackers’ movements, were almost nonexistent.

The website run by One Liberty Plaza’s building management company had been laced with a Russian-made exploit kit known as Blackhole, infecting tenants who visited the page to pay bills or do other maintenance.

The situation was so bad, one investigator referred to Nasdaq’s computer banks as “the dirty swamp.”

There were indications that a large cache of data was stolen, though proof was scarce, and it was hard to see what was spirited out.

A subsequent investigation showed systematic security failures riddling some of the most important U.S. financial institutions.

Many of them were vulnerable to the same attack that struck Nasdaq. They were spared only because the hackers hadn’t bothered to try.

By mid-2011, investigators began to conclude that the Russians weren’t trying to sabotage Nasdaq.

Amazon has made its name in ecommerce and cloud but its next frontier may be productivity applications and in the process, they may disrupt the entire enterprise software and cloud market. Zocalo is a new service from the company which allows the sharing of numerous document types with full version reviewed support and the ability to store files in specific geographical locations for compliance reasons. It works across devices (pretty much all of them), continents (files can be stored in the US and Europe (Ireleand) as of today) and can communicate with Active Directory if required. File transfers are encrypted and documents can be shared internally and externally.

The following diagram is borrowed from the substantial cranial database of TMC partner in WebRTC Expo and UC University, Phil Edholm who was a major tech driver at Nortel and Avaya for decades. It was modified a bit by me.

The state of the PBX market can be summed up by this chart showing existing vendors getting squeezed between Microsoft coming from the OS down, Cisco coming from the router out and cloud and open-source coming from the bottom up in terms of pricing. In short, it is a tough time to be a PBX vendor.

Let me start off apologizing for writing about a non-tech topic and also for a somewhat sensational headline but I believe what I have to say here supersedes my responsibility to just cover the typical topics you come here to see. I have been traveling a great deal lately and as a result signed up for and was accepted to the TSA Pre check lanes at the airport meaning a more relaxed screening as shoes remain on, laptops stay in the bag, etc. The only issue is over the last few months, before I was accepted to the program, I have been chosen at random with hundreds of other passengers in Indiana, New York and Orlando to go through this line.

The point is, to be accepted in Pre you have to give fingerprints, submit to a background check, etc.

There are some good thoughts from Carl Ford on the Supreme Court Aereo ruling which says the company cannot transmit content freely received over public airwaves over the internet while also providing a DVR service and charging customers. Carl argues that the Supreme Court lost track of the public good regarding this case but I would argue that that is not the job of the court. Instead, I would make the point that if I were to come to your house and install a digital TV antenna, DVR and Slingbox I would effectively be giving you what Aereo does. If I were to charge monthly for the equipment, would this not be providing the same service Aero does?

Recently I had a chance to give Truphone a weeklong test drive in Europe. The company sent me a new iPhone 5s and a HUAWEI MiFi E5776s-32. When I landed in France the iPhone worked perfectly but the MiFi did not. I called customer service by dialing 707 on a Sunday morning.

Whether you think the Surface Pro 3 is a good product or not depends a great deal on the applications you plan on using and the specific needs you have. It is better than an iPad and a MacBook Air in many ways and also worse. While I have had about a week to use the device I have found it is a lot more productivity-inducing than an iPad Air if you get tremendous volumes of email like I do. Specifically, Outlook 2013 is a much better interface than the email client on an iPad.

People in the tech space generally accept the Innovator's Dilemma written by Clayton M. Christensen as fact - companies need to either disrupt or be disrupted. Jill Lepore writing for the New Yorker Magazine questions much of what is "accepted wisdom" or as Al Gore might call it, "settled science" in a well-researched and written piece debunking much of what techies have believed for decades.

Lepore's argument is that the book uses handpicked case studies which aren't necesarily cut and dry in terms of their outcomes. Moreover, the innovators aren't always more successful than the incumbents as you can see from this passage below: